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So, I have finally decided to run second darkness a third time. Being one of my favorite adventure paths I must say there are some excrutiating flaws within its cover. I am going to name a few and I am going to ask people for their fixes to the problems and I will include my possible fixes. If you are in my game DO NOT READ!!!
1. The module starts out as a seedy adventure that by book 3 starts turning into a crusade to end a plot to end the world.
I have a few ideas on this. I have made all my players choose characters that were good at heart. Like Han Solo, you could count on them doing the right thing when it mattered. Other than that I didn't change much.
2. The players do not have a chance to return to Riddleport.
I am thinking about making sure they get down time but later in the books that's not possible. I am thinking about building up Riddleport so much that they return using teleport. I kinda need help on this one.
3. The Whole book 4 skill check for jobs fiasco.
This idea in this book is terrible. Why roll 60 days worth of checks for really doing nothing. I have decided to take on the flavor of some of the jobs and have the party escort Faidaeva Vonnarc somewhere dangerous all the while she is using her super dominance to whip a certain party member unconscious at times. I am really going to play her evil on this trip. Also I am going to have the party told to go retrieve an item from a group of drow and be robbed. The party will then have to go back in and massacre the drow who thought they would curse the Vonnarc name which will cause major alignment problems as the scream for mercy even though they were told to hideously murder every one of them.
4. Book 5
Book 5 sucks as written. I am going to instead have the Shin Rakorath attack as normal. The queen call the Pc's in. Then the queen is going to instead plea for help in thwarting the council. She asks them to go in there, gather them together and explain that they are not needed anymore by the queen and that they will be disbanded and if things get out of control to do what is necessary to keep the council from exerting any power over the elves again. So, book 5 can continue kinda as normal and when Hialin turns drow and pulls the Malficus Spike out after being told his power is being stripped by the queen the rest of the council stands and does nothing each for their own reason. The party must handle by themselves Hialin and all the demons that fall upon the group.
If you have any input at all or advice on how to do something better please let me know as I would really like to write a really good fix here on the forums for others who are afraid of running Second Darkness because of the problems. Let me know.
The changes are good for a start. The thing that the designers didn't take into account IMO is if any PCs get a CDG when asleep. Sure they might be properly paranoid and keep watch but as guests of the elf nobility? A single PC death during the attack might derail the entire thing.
"You mean you want us to help you after Larry got his head chopped off? No hard feelings? Ya...no.."
Great suggestions!
I haven't DM'ed Second Darkness, so I can't help you, but I'm hoping to DM it one day after I finish my Curse of the Crimson Throne campaign. From my quick read throug of the APs your suggestions make a lot of sense.
In another thread, James Jacobs stated that he felt that he knew how he could fix the problems with Second Darkness.
You might consider posting on his "Ask James Jacobs ALL your Questions Here" thread to share the broad strokes of how he would do it.
If you do, please post a link to it here as I'd be interested to find out what he says.
I think your changes should be helpful if you need them stated for Pathfinder I have a tread on here
FYI - In follow up to my previous post, I found this quote from James Jacobs when I did a search of the messageboards:
"[...]The three biggest flaws in Second Darkness that I would fix were I to re-do it:
1) I would make the elves more likable. This would primarily result in a significant rewriting and reorganization of the first half of the fifth adventure, along with a relatively fair amount of rewriting to the third adventure.
2) I would make it less jarring to go from being Riddleport natives who want to run a gaming hall and be kinda scurvy thugs to being do-gooders who want to help the elves.
3) I would build a new adventure to fit in between the 2nd adventure and the 3rd one, to remove the XP gap that currently exists, and to smooth over the transition mentioned in #2 above."
The thing with Book 4 and all the skill checks, I think, is to use them as an adventure generator, rather than running them straight. The thing ought to feel something like "we are a Resistance guy in Paris during the Second World War", doing various risky and scuzzy things and never quite sure who we can trust, probably compress it into a somewhat smaller number of adventures, but give the players the feel of being in a city with the Gestapo always about to close in on them.
Give the PCs a chance to make choices and mistakes along the line, rather than just sit there going "ho, hum, another skill check."
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Agree with tonyz. I ran book 4 largely as written, but I didn't just skim over the time with "roll your skill check for day 1, roll for day 2...." Play out whatever tasks they get. If they roll 'guard a noble on an expedition outside the house,' then come up with someplace creepy and flavorful for the noble to go and let them play it out. One of them went to a play put on by the theater troupe and witnessed a politial assassination carried out as part of the performance; all the talk after the curtain fell was how lucky everyone felt to have been at the performance where the Second Daughter of House Whatever got whacked. Another got sent with the drunken daughter to a Ladies who Lunch social event at the country club, where the hors d'oeuvres were served off the supine bodies of nude male slaves. My players were totally creeped out by Zirnikaynin and desperate to complete their mission and get out of there.
I also played up Gadak. Almost every day, one of them would suddenly feel like they were being watched as they were cleaning the house or running errands and turn around to see him watching them. He'd stroll up to them sometimes and ask leading questions that made them sure that he was on to them. ("Do you feel like your time on the surface changed you? Do you ever feel like you came back a whole different person?") One time he had them all imprisoned and beaten and questioned them separately, trying to find inconsistencies in their stories. (I took the players one by one into the next room, and the guys back at the table were sweating bullets -- the players, not the PCs.) Of course, he told each one that the last one had confessed the whole truth and they might as well stop lying and avoid worse punishment. They hated him.
It took a lot of sessions to play through, going to that level of immersion, but it was fantastic. My players got so paranoid by the end, they didn't trust anything or anyone; they immediately assumed everything that happened, no matter how straightforward, was an intricate trap for them. It was hilarious. That was probably one of my favorite modules to run.
I have a campaign journal on this site. The entries that deal with the PCs' time in Zirnikaynin start here. Looking back, I notice we spent 8 sessions just on the working-for-House-Vonnarc interlude -- but it was a lot of fun!
I also have a thread here where I and some other DMs discuss changes we made to the AP.